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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Me Thinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

All week I keep running in to the recent study being widely
heralded across our nation declaring that organic fruit, vegetables, and meat
are no more nutritious than conventional fruit, vegetables, and meat. So? I
think the study completely misses the point on organics. I don’t eat organic
because I think the food is better for me nutritionally, I eat it because it
doesn’t have pesticides, GMO
engineering, artificial additives, preservatives, and God knows what else in
it.

As a parent of a child with an incurable auto immune
disorder which has an environmental trigger that has yet to be identified, I’m
all about avoiding unnecessary chemicals. My
leanings aside, there have been MANY
studies indicating the potential danger of pesticides, artificial food dyes,
and GMO engineered foods. Beyond
that, no person with a fully functioning brain needs a study to tell them that
chemicals meant to kill insects are not something they want to be ingesting.

Beyond the nutrition and the chemicals avoided, I eat
organic fruits, vegetables, and meat because they taste better. I’ve done my
own studies, and the four other participants in my extremely local study agree
with me. Organic food tastes exceedingly better and we don’t need a
multi-million dollar study to tell us that.

Now, if you want to compare the nutritional value of locally
grown fruits and veggies with conventionally grown veggies shipped to me from
across the country, I would hypothesize that the local stuff is more nutritious
simply because it’s fresh. It hasn’t lost valuable nutrients in the process of
being stored and shipped.

I’ve come across this Stanford study in basically every
newspaper, periodical, and news web page I’ve opened this week. Which begs the
question, who’s paying for all this publicity? (And who funded the study to
begin with?) Could it be that conventional farming lobbyiests and food industry
advocates are desperate to turn the tide of public opinion? At my house, the
party that protests the loudest is typically the guilty party. Just a thought.